US sales: November 2017, brands

The see-sawing we have observed in the US market in the past few months continued in November, with a sales increase of 1.4%. This follows a decline in October, growth in September, and eight straight months of decline before that. As a result of the larger decline in sales earlier in the year the market is still down 1.2% YTD, but this still looks much better than the position it was just four months ago in July, when it was down 2.6% YTD. It is still much too early to talk about a recovery per se, but the signs are the worst decline has been halted for now.

November’17 Highlights:

Even though, much like in the whole market, sales in the Top 10 rose slightly, this growth was concentrated with only a few brands: six out of the ten brands saw their sales fall in November

The biggest winner by far was Nissan, which saw its sales rise by 19.3%, which was enough to put it ahead of its arch-rival Honda in November, even though the latter also saw its sales rise by a healthy 8.2%

Nissan Rogue

Ahead of the two Japanese brands the Top 3 saw another good performance from the market leader, Ford (sales up 7.6%), while both Chevrolet and Toyota saw their sales fall slightly compared to Nov’16

In sixth place Jeep saw its sales fall by 1.9%, which actually made November the brand’s least bad month since January, though it did extend its streak of consecutive sales declines to 15 months

The Korean duo, Hyundai in seventh and Kia in tenth, continued to lose sales as they had pretty much all year

By their standards November was not a great month for eight-placed Subaru, which barely eked out positive growth, and GMC, whose sales fell by 5.8%

Among the remaining mainstream brands there were two surprisingly good performances: Chrysler was an unexpected winner, as it registered 13.7% growth (its first in over two years!), while Mitsubishi saw its sales go up almost by a quarter

Chrysler Pacifica

The other mainstream brands did not do so well: after seeing its sales rise by almost 10% in October, sales at Volkswagen fell by 4.5%, which was worse than the decline over at Mazda (down 2.6%) and Buick (down 3.0%), better than the 5.0% sales decline over at Ram, and much better than the 10.4% fall at Mini, 15.3% fall at Dodge, 28.2% fall at Fiat

Still, the worst performance by far came from Smart, whose sales collapsed by over three-quarters

Luxury brands performed better than mainstream brands in November, registering an average growth of 3.7% versus 1.0% for mainstream brands

From among luxury brands it was once again Tesla at the front, with sales rising by over 50%, with Genesis (up 36.0%), Land Rover (up 20.2%) and Audi (up 12.1%) all seeing their sales go up by double-digits

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About Krzysztof Wozniak

Kriss grew up in Poland reading German car magazines, before moving to England and graduating to the British magazines, which he still considers the best in the world and continues reading them after he'd moved to the US. In college he promised himself he's buy himself a used Porsche before he turned 30 (not to be accused of having a mid-life crisis), but instead family needs dictated a Subaru Outback. Still waiting for that perfect moment to buy a used 2008-ish Cayman...
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